Interview with Arnold and Elke Neuberger

Harford Living Treasures Arnold & Elke Neuburger
Interviewer: Doug Washburn = DW
Interviewee: Arnold Neuberger = AN
Female voice: Elke Neuberger (wife) = EN
Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 7, January, 2009 and I'm with Harford Living Treasures, Arnold and Elke Neuburger of Jarrettsville. And for the record let me say that this is a real treat for me since some forty-five years ago, I went to work for Doc Arnold at the Jarrettsville Pharmacy. Our families were in the same neighborhood on Schuster Road for several years. So, welcome and thanks for taking time with me today.
AN It's nice to be here.
DW So, how did you wind up in Jarrettsville?
AN Well, I graduated from pharmacy school in 1959. I got a job; had a small baby and wonderful wife and I went to work in a pharmacy in Linthicum. From there I went to work at Doctor Levin's first on Liberty Road. Well, that didn't last too long and moved to another store in Linthicum down near the airport. I decided early on that, you know, I worked very hard so I may as well work very hard for myself than work for somebody else that hard. So for one reason or another, I was able to acquire Jarrettsville Pharmacy. I purchased it in August of 1960. I commuted for fourteen months; drove back and forth every day at 10:00 at night and came back the next morning at 9:00 to open the store, six days a week and of course on Sunday I worked until 5:00, half a day. That became quite a chore, and I decided I would be better off if I lived here. I thought I would come here for a short time because I didn't know my wife or how I would adapt to country living at a slower pace. I was still a city boy. Believe me this was slow pace in 1960.
DW [Laughs]
AN We decided to build a house which we did on Schuster Road. And in a short time, when the house was done, it was near January 1962; we quickly adapted. And in six months I decided I was never leaving here. This was just a wonderful place. So that's the beginning of whatever else you're going to ask.
DW O.k.
EN Can I add something?
DW Sure.
EN The first time we came here to look at the store was in June or July of '59. And we got in the car and we had no idea where Jarrettsville was. They gave us directions and we came from the Liberty Road Randallstown area. We drove and we drove; I thought Jarrettsville Pike was endless. They sent us through Sweet Air Road and then up Baldwin Mill. I thought we would never get here. I figured I was going to another state. It was hysterical. We got here on a Saturday afternoon; there was one Pharmacist and one clerk in the store.
AN Dorothy Johnson, wasn't it?
DW I don't know.
EN Anyway, we were …
AN At the time he worked for Bunk Grimmel. [All talking at the same time]
DW Is that the Johnson that was up on the cat tail in Madonna?
EN Yes.
DW O.k.
EN Anyhow, we drove and we drove and we got here finally and we looked around and we decided that the price was right. The store was for us. But it was hysterical because, you know; I was born and raised in the city. What did I know about country life? When he came home and said would you move, I said well I'll move maybe for five years because Arnold worked seven days a week then. We had no help. Maybe by the time you get relief Pharmacists and the children are ready to go to school, I'll move back. Well, you are right. We moved here in January and six months, by the end of that summer, I knew this was it for me.
DW Did a realtor help you find the business?
EN No, I got it through the drug wholesaler. My friend who was a sales manager there, Allen Settler; I called him and I said Allen I'm tired of working for somebody else, find me a drugstore for myself. Of course, I never thought it would be up here. It was [not] very long after that he called me and he said well this is a little far away for you, but come and take a look at it and see what you think. Of course we did and that's what happened.
DW And was the drugstore …. well of course the drug store when I worked for you was right next to Harford Gas.
AN Yes.
DW Or Southern States. Was that where the store was when you bought it?
AN Yes. The store was … I had opened the store originally. The store was a year and a half old. The store originally opened in December of 1958. John Padusis was the Pharmacist and his sister was his partner.
EN Agnes Zymades is her name.
AN Agnes Zymdes. In fact, her son was a dentist down here in Fallston in the later years. And they had the store. Well, John didn't like the long rides, and he came to work when he felt like it, and he left when it wasn't busy at night, and things like that. Well, you can't really run a business that way. And she wasn't a Pharmacist, so she had to have him, a Registered Pharmacist. So they just decided to sell it. So I ended up buying it. So I was here about a year and a half, the store.
DW O.k. I didn't remember.
AN Dick Henderson was very instrumental in getting a pharmacy here.
EN And I think the Jarrettsville Lions Club was somewhat involved in getting a pharmacy, through Dick, to get a pharmacy here because people had to travel.
AN You had to go all the way to Bel Air.
EN Bel Air in those days was the closest one. Everybody was very happy when we were here. We had regular hours, and we opened on time and we closed on time. In bad weather, Elizabeth Henderson would call up and say to Arnold, "You are not driving to Baltimore in this weather." You are staying here". So she put him up. She fed him breakfast. Good breakfast; better breakfast than he ever got from me every morning. [Laughter] And he used to stay there.
AN I used to drive that road; I drove that road in a 1950 Chevrolet Coupe. Ed Calary would come up about six or seven o'clock in the evening in bad weather, and he'd put the chains on. And that was fine going home with those chains down Jarrettsville Pike because nothing had been done to that either. But boy you hit that beltway … BANG. The chains broke and they banged that car the rest of the way home. [Laughter]
EN It was terrible.
AN That was a sign that we had to move.
DW When you say "Dick", you mean Dick Henderson?
EN Yes.
AN Yes.
DW Of course he would have been Harford Gas.
AN Right, Harford Gas.
EN He was our first landlord.
DW First landlord, o.k.
AN I was down there seven years before we built around the corner.
DW Yes, o.k. And it was him and his brother.
AN A. B. Henderson.
DW O.k. A.B. lived in the house where the florist …
EN No, right next door to Harford Gas; the big farm house was there.
AN The florist was on the other side. That was …
EN I don't know whose house that was.
AN That was Egelston's.
DW Oh, o.k.
EN I think your right.
DW I remembered that wrong, then. [Laughs]
AN I think it was Egelston's.
EN Well when we moved around the corner we bought … Bob Still owned that house.
AN The state police trooper.
EN It was a house and we burnt the house down and built the store.
DW Now I remember … Was that next to the old Bircham's Store then?
EN Yes.
DW O.k. It wasn't … Because somebody the other day was asking me about a house that used to be in there and I couldn't remember anything.
AN Where the bank is now, was Margaret Daughton's house.
DW Right.
AN And between Margaret Daughton's house and where the drugstore is now, like in that little dip where the drugstore sign is, that's where the old Burcham's Store was.
DW O.k. Then there was a house …
AN Pavey's was on the other side after that.
DW I did not remember the other house except for … the lady that worked for Bircham for so many years.
EN Oh, Pavey's.
DW The called her …
EN Oh, Louise Putnam.
DW Putnam. I remember the grey …
EN That was two doors up from Bircham's.
DW O.k. I just don't remember the house in the middle there.
EN Yes.
DW Well, what other kinds of businesses were in the neighborhood when you came?
AN Well, Water's Brothers Hardware Store and, of course, Southern States. The general store on the corner; that's where you got your hair cut and the post office was in there. Plus you got your groceries and things like that you know.
DW Yes.
AN St. Clair's.
DW Yes, St. Clair's where Keene is today.
AN And old Mr. St. Clair, Albert's father, where the drug store was, he had a black smith shop years ago. His father was a black smith.
DW Oh, I didn't know that.
AN And then he opened up an automobile place there in the beginning, and when things got better, they built across the street and around the corner.
DW You already mentioned Calary's down the road.
EN That was after; they weren't a lot of services around here. I mean I thought I lived in the middle of nowhere so originally I used to go back every week; every time I needed to go to the beauty shop, I went to town. We did grocery shopping; I went to Towson to do grocery shopping. There was a food fair where Towson Town Plaza is now.
AN Across the street from the Towson Towne Plaza.
EN It wasn't a food fair; that's a Super Fresh, which is A&P.
AN Oh, it was the A&P store.
EN We had to leave town really to do everything. It was the boonies for us. [Laughs]
AN Wasn't there a beauty shop here?
EN Didn't know. I was what, twenty-four years old when we came here? What did I know? [Laughter] I was raised in a row house in the city.
DW Right.
EN But it was not easy; it was not hard to become comfortable and find out that this was a good way to live.
AN Well, the people made you feel comfortable.
EN Yes.
AN The farming community and the farmers all worked together in the respect of helping each other out and things like that. And they really wanted a pharmacy. They needed it and it saved them from driving a twelve mile round trip to get a prescription filled or whatever they needed in the way of a pharmacy item. So keeping us here was wonderful for them. And then the drugstore became like a hang-out; like a general store. [Laughter]
DW Which I guess led to the coffee club eventually.
EN Yes.
AN Eventually, yes. That all happened in the new store, but we had old Mr. Calary, Harry Calary. He did all his chores and milked and all that stuff in the morning. By ten o'clock he was ready to come up and have … Of course to him it was lunch, because he had been up since three o'clock in the morning. [Laughs] And sure enough ten o'clock in the morning there was Mr. Calary. He got his lunch, whatever he got and so on and so forth like that. We got all the old stories from him.
EN Didn't he also, after his wife passed away, used to come up for dinner and sit at the fountain?
AN Oh yeah.
EN That's when he used to tell you all about Jarrettsville and what was going on.
AN One time he talked about getting up in the morning and he teased me you know. I said are you kidding? My feet are on the floor seven o'clock in the morning. And he proceeded to tell me what he had done by seven o'clock in the morning because he got up at three. I never said that to him again. [Laughter]
EN It was fun. I guess Mary White's father, Mr. Blackhall; he kind of started with the coffee club because he used to come in the morning for coffee and then at three o'clock in the afternoon.
AN He'd come back.
EN He would come back and drink what was left over in the pot. And then originally Marvel Wynskowski's father and so it kind of got together and it started in the morning with let's flip whose going to pay for coffee. And that's how it all got started.
AN It didn't start until we got around the corner though.
EN Yes that started in the new store.
AN And the club got big.
DW Yes, yes.
AN Big time.
EN And it still goes on.
DW And a couple of articles in the paper about it every once in a while.
AN Oh yeah.
DW I think some of the other people that I can remember coming into drink coffee when I worked for you was Pete Shelton and Johnny Breidenbaugh.
EN Oh yeah. And you know who else? Roger Sexton used to come in every day at 11:30. He worked at Water's Hardware, and he would come for lunch every day and if he didn't show up at 11:30, it wasn't 11:30.
AN It wasn't 11:31, it was 11:30.
EN The back door would open …
DW [Laughs]
AN He hung his coat on the hook back there.
EN Yes. he hung his coat up on the hinge on the door and went up to the fountain.
AN By the time he got up to the fountain; it was a long walk. They had his place set up for him. His napkin was there and his glass of water because he was a regular.
DW That was great.
EN It was a comfortable place to come. The people were comfortable and obviously we made them comfortable and so it's been a wonderful experience.
DW So your girls; you have daughters, right?
EN Yes, two girls.
DW So they would have gone to the old Jarrettsville Elementary School.
EN Right. Mr. Pyle was a principal. Was it Mr. Pyle? No, he was at North Harford.
DW He was at North Harford, right.
AN Mr. Baker?
EN Fred Baker was there, but before Fred Baker. I can't remember who it was. But yes, they went to school there. And I was active in PTA there and that's how I got involved with … Edna Bergman and I together started the Spring Fling for Jarrettsville Elementary School. I think I named it and we started it. I think they still have a Spring Fling every year. But it was also small and it was community and it was wonderful. From there they went to North Harford. North Harford in those days was Junior/Senior High School.
DW Right.
EN There was no middle school, so they went there.
AN Were they there when Mr. Pyle was principal? Or had he already retired?
EN I think he was there like one year and then Joe Evans came as the principal. I was very active up there too. I was PTA president for several years. Mary White used to get me involved in all these things. In the interim my kids joined 4-H and that's how I got involved in 4-H. Mary White said you will come help me, won't you? And so I did, p.s. forty years later I still work with the 4-H in the county.
AN For the interim Mary White's two boys played football. They started an Endzone Club so one thing leads to another, and she was president of the Endzone Club for five years, and I was president of the Endzone Club for five years.
EN And we didn't have any boys. [Laughs]
AN And I didn't have any children that played sports. Well, Barbara played tennis, but not football.
EN Right. And I used to call football games. I started out as a … I was raised … you have to know football to be in my family. And I was a spotter in the beginning for Greg Wilkinson who used to call the games. And he passed away suddenly. So I just took it over and I called for several years, I guess, before we decided to retire from there. But our children were all out of school and in college already when we stopped doing that, because it was fun.
AN That was a fun job.
EN Yeah. And the Endzone Club was a very close knit group of people. It was a brand new type of booster club that they never had before and it strictly supported the football program. The county couldn't afford to do it in those days. As a matter of fact, we were instrumental in getting the first field lights up there so we could have night games at North Harford.
AN We put the scoreboard up. We built the blockhouse where they took the films from [two people talking at once] They built another stand where they sold drinks and hot dogs and things like that on game night, you know. But that was all hard work but it was enjoyable.
DW Well when did football … When I went to North Harford they didn't play football; it wasn't allowed. So when did …
EN Really?
DW No, and I graduated in '65. So do you remember when football even started up there?
EN No.
AN It must have been right after that because …
EN I'm surprised. It must have been right after that. I think Ronnie Tarbert was one of the people who was instrumental in starting that. I think Hayward Putnam may have been involved in that, was he; in starting the Endzone Club, because we pretty much used to buy helmets and uniforms. It had to be a program maybe that was in other schools because a lot of them had lights, like Bel Air High School, of course, obviously had lights way before us. We were one of the last, but I couldn't tell you that.
DW What kind of changes did you see in the education system as your kids were going through? Any improvements or things you weren't happy with?
EN No, I was very happy. I found that when our kids were there, especially in elementary school, they were the minority in the class that wasn't from a farm family. Most of your children were farmers. By the time they got to high school it was probably the opposite. The farm kids were on the down side of the kids who didn't live on a farm, because a lot of the farms had been sold and developments had started and things like that, so. No, the school system was good; they were good to our children. They put a lot in and they both were very lucky with public school. They went to good colleges and they have good jobs. I was happy with Harford County system.
DW Good. You mentioned the 4-H. Do you know any of the history of how things started off? I know that you're active in Farm Fair, too. So how did 4-H evolve into the Farm Fair?
EN Well, of course, 4-H were individual clubs, and in Jarrettsville we started out when our children were young in one 4-H club and then they moved. Mary White and I had Happy Helpers and then we moved on and as our kids got a little older we started Willing Workers Junior and then when we had seniors, we went to Willing Workers Seniors. We worked…. There was a fair. We had a Harford County 4-H Fair at Rocks 4-H Camp. That was since my children were in 4-H; that went on. And so I guess we were almost twenty years up there when Doctor Cook, Richard Cook, came to me and said would you meet with us, we are looking to start a County Fair again. The old County Fair used to be where Harford Mall is now.
DW The race track.
EN And of course that was the end of that. So I met with them, and they said do you think you could convince 4-H to come in? If not, we can't probably support a County Fair. So I went back and met with some people, and we decided to go with them because to be perfectly honest like I said about the farm kids being on the down side; our fair was on the down side, with the animal end of it. They were less dairy farms, less beef farms around at the time, and so we were on the decline. We decided to do it and that's how it came to be. So I ended up on the Board of the Farm Fair as an initial Board member. I'm only, I think, one of two right now that are still on the Farm Fair board from the original group. Its worked well and it really got exposure for 4-H as well as agriculture in the county. And our 4-H program has grown from it. So, we're doing very well and we enjoy it and we get a lot more exposure there, and it's great. It's a lot of work. It's become a year- round job, but it's good.
DW Earlier too, you had mentioned the Lions Club. What's a little history of what the Lions Club is all about?
AN Well it goes back to Dick Henderson again. Lions Club was a service organization back. In fact, it's one of the largest service organizations in the world today. Dick Henderson was instrumental in getting that started, too. In fact he might have been the first…. He brought me into it. I came here in 1960, and he convinced me to join the Lions Club in 1963. I've been in the Lions Club, I guess, about forty-five years. It's a group again; it's all about community. They serve the community and raise a lot of money. We have a big carnival and raise a lot of money, and all that money gets distributed to the needy people or needy programs in the community. And again, in the beginning you met the same farmers that I met at the drugstore. They were all in the Lions Club, too. Of course, now that's spread out too. In the beginning when I first got in the Lions Club we had eighty some members and that started a real decline. It dropped way back to maybe thirty or thirty-five. Now we're back to sixty some members. So it's starting to grow a little bit. It's very difficult for service organizations today because people don't have time for that. They are busy, they work, and the wife works. When they go home and they have to take the children to dance lessons, piano lessons, baseball practice and all those things. People don't have time for service organizations any more, which is very important. It's a shame.
EN Volunteerism all over is falling off.
AN Everything is hurting, yeah.
EN And I understand it's not only that; we have problems in 4-H getting new volunteers to help. I think rec programs cut into a lot of that, which are wonderful, but they've cut into a lot of the things. Because it's easier to go play ball than it is to do volunteer work. But Lions Club also supports the eye.
AN Well that was originally an eye bank. Sight still is our big program; it's supported world-wide. We've gotten into hearing aids and things like that. You know you can come to the Lions Club and ask for anything if you are having some problems paying your heat bill. We have a lot of people in the community that lose their jobs or get a sickness and they come up against it and they'll come to the Lions Club and ask. There are no questions asked; they check it out and they're right there with help. We don't do it all but we're there with help.
DW Great. I guess I was not aware of all that, the history of the Lions. Well let me see, what else do we have here? How about the town square before the traffic light? The roads were paved before you came, right?
AN Oh yeah.
EN Except for Old Federal Hill, no, [North] Furnace Road.
AN [North] Furnace Road.
EN [North] Furnace Road wasn't paved when you lived here.
DW I know.
AN I remember a warm July afternoon; I could go out and lay in the middle of that road. Nobody would bother me. [Laughter] Now you can't. You go out of the drugstore and try to get out of that road … like on Friday, it's very difficult.
DW Now the hotel, the old store …
AN That was before I came here.
DW The hotel was.
AN The old firehouse was where the hotel was.
DW Keene uses the garage now, but that was gone out of the town.
EN We're not that old! [Laughs]
DW Well, I can remember being in the general store; I worked in the general store before I came to work for you. And I can remember before there was a traffic light there.
AN Oh yeah.
EN Mr. Clarence Burton; you worked for him?
DW No, he was the Post Master.
EN Oh right, right.
DW It was Burgess.
EN Oh right, Burgess. Then they moved to Florida, didn't they?
DW Yes, they lived up next to Wilbur Waters on Schuster Road.
EN And the barber was Adrian Yell.
DW Yep.
EN And when the fire siren would go off …
AN He dropped cutting your hair and ran out in the middle of the road because he directed traffic.
EN He was the traffic director for the fire department.
DW [Laughs]
AN So you had to wait until he came back to get your hair finished.
DW That was a shame when they tore that store down.
EN And there was no bank in Jarrettsville. Arnold used to drive to Forest Hill to go to the bank. That was the closest.
AN And where the shopping center is, the strip of stores; that was the old Jarrett place, originally.
EN Well originally it was the Jarrett place, yes.
AN That house was built in 1842.
EN Do you remember that big house?
DW Oh sure. Keyes lived there.
EN Keyes lived there, right.
DW Yes, that was still there when I worked at the general store.
EN It was a beautiful home. They tried … A. B. Henderson tried to be instrumental. He got a group together. I went to a meeting or two, but it didn't work in trying to preserve that house. But by the time they got there, the inside of the house had been so vandalized that … the staircase had been taken out.
AN The Historical Society wanted to keep that.
EN Yeah, it just wasn't feasible to do it because the interior was so depleted.
AN The bricks for that house were brought from England in 1842 to build that house.
DW [Hang on a second; let me flip the tape here.] It was quite common in the old days where the bricks were actually used as ballast in the ships coming over. They would come over for the raw materials to take them back to England and they would use bricks as ballast to come over here.
AN That was what I was told; that the bricks came from England.
EN Weren't the people that lived there originally Brown? Why does that name ring a bell?
AN Somebody committed suicide in there; hung themselves.
DW Now that's a story I have not heard.
EN Me neither.
AN Yeah.
EN But I think the name was Brown. But they were part of the Jarrett family. I think so; I'll have to look that up.
DW No, I don't remember that. How about when the new Post Office was built? Was that at the same as the general store being torn down? Is that what prompted that?
AN Yeah, probably.
EN Because there was no place else.
AN Grimmel's had that piece of property, and they built the Post Office.
EN Which we've kind of outgrown. But it's like …
AN We've got the nice … Grimmel's, their store.
EN Oh yea, Grimmel's Hardware store.
DW Oh yeah. That would have been there.
AN They sold coal and all that kind of stuff.
DW Oh yes.
EN They had a big business there. And of course Kefauver; well that's Forest Hill, but Kefauver Lumber; that's who built all our houses and our schools.
DW Being in the pharmacy business, obviously you would have had a lot of exposure to the prescriptions written by the local doctors.
AN Yes.
DW And I know you are good friends with Jim White. Was there anybody else that was even in the area?
AN Yes, right across where the doctors are now. There are three doctors there next to the Waters'. There was a house there, Doctor Mosely, T. Mosely. He had an office there. He and Jim White were the only two physicians here in those days. It was right next to Waters'. Mr. [Dr.] White was up there on Houcks Mill Road.
EN He was just here a short time when we were here. I don't know how … he didn't stay very long.
AN Who, Mosely?
EN Yes. I remember it was a little white building that he was in. I don't know, because we always went to Jim White and he was all the way up on Houcks Mill Road. And you just walked in you didn't need an appointment like you do in doctors' offices now. You went in and you sat and waited your turn, twice a day; morning and then late in the evening.
DW And, of course, Jim made house calls.
EN Oh yes. And that's how we became friendly and our children became very friendly, and of course they're still very friendly. Our families are pretty close.
AN There was a dentist, wasn't there?
EN A dentist started in the building, Ivan Gardner …
AN Where this office building is.
EN Next to the cemetery? That big brick office building?
AN That was a great big green cottage, three story old farm house, green cottage. And they built that building around it. You couldn't get permits to build a new building or anything like that. You could do what you wanted when you were repairing the older building, the original building. So he built a new building around that and then they went inside and tore the old part out or rearranged it. [Laughter] And that's how that building came about.
EN But he started out there as a dentist; he was the first dentist in town, Ivan Gardner that I remember when we were here.
AN Yeah.
EN And then he left and Ron Reichert came. Was there somebody between them? Ron Reichert started in his home.
AN Dr. May.
EN That was after Ron Reichert, no May was in between.
AN Reichert bought it from Doctor May.
EN But he was on Dulaney Drive and Jarrettsville Road in the basement of the house. They owned the house and then Doctor May was down there and then sold to Ron Reichert. And they moved in there and did that. That was the dentist.
AN And Manny Sklar.
EN Was the eye doctor.
AN Yes, but did he go in where Gardner, where the dentist was?
EN Might have; I don't remember.
AN Jarrettsville was growing and we were, you know, after a while in later years you really could stay in the community. You didn't have to leave outside of a place to buy clothes.
EN Yeah. It was nice to have more services that you didn't have to leave the community.
AN Everything was right here.
EN And it was kind of nice for us. It was interesting because you knew everybody in those days. Not only did you know; you knew them, you knew their mothers, you knew their grandparents and when somebody came in, you could ask how everybody was.
AN That's how I could hire Doug Washburn, because I knew his father, Glen.
DW [Laughs]
EN Right.
AN And they both came from good families, so it was o.k. to hire him.
EN And also as the children grew up and had children; that's how Arnold used to get a hold of the little babies and he was always the first one to give them their first lollipop and drive the mothers crazy because they would drool all that sticky down on them. And he loved it! He loved watching them do that! [Laughter] Many a kid around here has had lollipops drooled down their snow suits from him.
AN [both talking at same time] everybody; it was just nice.
DW That certainly must have been a change from; that must have been the single biggest change from city life.
EN Oh yeah.
AN Never heard of such a thing.
EN Both of our families, our parents thought we moved to Timbuktu.
AN The other end of the world.
EN Well your mother really thought it was the end of the world.
AN The old Loch Raven bridge before the one they have now, you know the other rickety thing. So mother and my father drove up to visit and she said to my father, are you going to drive across that? [Laughter] Do we have to go across that bridge? Yes, we have to go across that bridge if you want to get there; unless you want to swim. She thought my goodness.
DW Were your parents long-time Baltimore area?
EN Oh yeah.
DW I mean your father; that was your roots?
EN Yeah.
AN So now when I drive from here to Towson, it's like from here to the end of the driveway; I don't give it a second thought.
DW [Laughs]
AN They have to come all the way to town to do this or do that; I go, well it's only a half hour, you know. Because most of the people in the city they want a place to go in five minutes. If not, they don't go there.
DW Right.
EN Yeah. It's nice. We used to say we would go to visit our families on the weekends and it was awful nice in the summertime when you hit the county, Baltimore/Harford County line and you knew you were home. And it even smelled different.
AN The air changed.
EN It really did. But watching the developments around here has been a little bit hard because you hated to see the farmers and the farm land go. And they're few and far between now.
DW Yep. All the ones that are left are huge.
EN They have to be.
AN They've got to be.
EN You can't be a small farmer anymore.
DW Well the machinery costs … If you're not farming a couple of thousand acres; you can't afford to buy the machinery.
EN Exactly.
DW You either have to own it or rent it. So what other kind of changes other than the housing developments have you seen?
AN Well the whole turnover of the population, different types of people. Of course the world has changed. We're talking about the good times that we had in the past, but the world isn't like that anymore. The new people that moved in across the road over there, in Secora's house … how long have they been here?
EN A couple of years. I've never even seen them.
AN Nobody's ever seen them; we don't know them.
EN I don't think their neighbors know them.
AN You know when people come here now … everybody leaves a community to work someplace else. They just sleep here. There isn't community like as such like we knew it, like you and I knew it from the old days.
DW Right.
EN But I am happy to see that some younger people now are joining Lions Club.
AN Oh yeah.
EN Which has been wonderful because the older generation can't do the work, the physical work that it entails. I mean, they redo homes for people. You have … Lions Club has built ramps for people that are wheel chair bound that need into their homes. Several have been done for people over the years. The older guys can't do that kind of physical labor anymore, so they do have a lot of new young people coming in and it's kind of nice to see that, that they're taking a part in the community.
AN And you've got these new schools that are very nice North Harford High School was rebuilt for forty-six million dollars for the school, but … Have you been in there?
DW Yes, in a couple of sections. I haven't been through the whole thing.
EN It is magnificent.
AN You've got to take a day off to go through the whole thing, it's so big. It's magnificent, it really is.
EN It's magnificent. We went to the show; the senior class did Les Mis, well the whole did the show. The auditorium is like sitting in a theatre; better than the theatres. It was just fabulous. The staging, the performances; it was one of the best productions I've seen, and we've seen that show professionally several times. And I think North Harford did a magnificent job. You know, the programs have changed at the school; the agricultural programs are much more expanded then when our kids were there.
DW Agriculture?
EN Yes, it's now a magnet agriculture school; it's a magnet program, you know.
AN They bring them in from all the other schools.
EN From all over. And it's expanded to even being involved with animal science or vet science, that type of thing; there's some of that. Community … you can bring your dog in there certain days of the week to be trimmed and groomed and things, so the programs have expanded. They also have a young pre-school program up there several days a week for the seniors that are going into education and to pre-school education. I think Harford County has done a very good job with public schools.
AN People today, they require services. You know years ago, mom didn't work; she stayed home and took care of her children. The mother is working and somebody's got to not only take their children at the early stages but there is so much more to learn today. This is one world and there's so much more to learn therefore they offer so much more. People demand more services.
DW Well…
EN I'm not sure if I can't think of much else.
AN I can't tell you about the future.
DW Can't tell me about the future, huh?
EN You never know what's going to happen tomorrow.
AN It's a nice community to live in. It's very safe and secure here even though we have crime here; it's the same in other places. Of course, not in the magnitude of other places, but you still have to be careful. If I forget to lock the door, I really don't worry about it too much. [Laughs]
DW You don't get back up out of bed if you remember, huh?
EN He did that one time with the old drugstore.
AN Oh yes, a lot of times at ten o'clock at night, I've rushed to get out of there so I closed the door and I'm going. I would come back the next morning and the damn door is unlocked.
DW [Laughs]
AN I said to the Dick Henderson, you know what I did last night? I went home and the darn store was unlocked. So? [Laughter] So was everything there when you got back this morning? I said yeah it was there, but still.
EN Well, when we first moved here they used to tease me because the milkman, if I wasn't going to be home, he didn't understand why … He said to me I know you came from the city because you lock your doors. Because he used to go in everybody's back door and put the milk in the refrigerator. Well, I'd lock the door.
AN She would tell him I'm not going to be here on Thursday, so don't leave any milk. He says, why? She said well I'm not going to be here; you can't leave the milk sit out in the sun; it's July. It's alright, I'll just put it in the refrigerator for you; no problem.
DW [Laughs]
EN And he used to tease me and said I know you came from the city because you're one of the only people around that locks their doors.
DW I'll be darn.
EN And pulls their curtains down at night. That was another thing they used to tease me about. [Laughter]
AN We have a … the back of our house was all glass and my mother-in-law used to come and we didn't have any curtains up. I'm looking at forty-four acres of undeveloped ground back there. She said you don't have any curtain. I said who's going to see? There's nobody back there.
EN I used to say mom I'm ten acres and nobody's going to know and then of course Grimmel's farm is attached to us so it didn't matter. But that's appalling when you come from the city. These are things that you would just do. Really it was hard in the beginning. But our children are so happy they're here. When they have to move on … and the first time Barbara got an apartment when she went to work and she had to pick which unit she wanted. And she picked one with a tree outside. I want to see a tree and grass; I don't want to see the concrete parking lot. And that's why Marcia still lives in Jarrettsville because she likes the country and she likes that feeling.
DW Does she commute to the town for work?
EN Downtown Baltimore every day.
AN Inner Harbor; she works for T. Rowe Price and drives for an hour every day.
DW Wow.
AN But you know, she wouldn't survive living in the city. She wouldn't have anything to do with her bird feeders and her hammock.
EN And her garden!
AN And her garden and her grill. What's she going to do with all those things? You don't do that in the city. [Laughter]
EN Well you don't in a condo where she would probably move.
AN Well, that's where everybody lives, pretty much, yeah.
EN She likes … they like … they love …
AN She thought about doing that.
EN They loved country life.
DW That's a big transition.
EN Well see now actually they don't know any different. Marcia was ten months old when we moved here. So they really don't know any different. They made life-long friends up here, too. You know what else I found out? This is something. I found out when children our kid's age when they graduated high school or if they went away to college and all, they wanted to run out because there was nothing here. You had to go out. There was nothing here to offer young people. Today I know a lot of my children's classmates from high school who have moved back here with children because they found out that this was a good community to raise your children in. To me that's saying something about your community.
AN I read an article not too long ago that said on average everybody drives an hour to work. Today you can't afford to live in the Metropolitan area; it's so expensive.
DW I know that there was a … some of the teachers up at North Harford that had (my wife and I) they had our kids and if our kids were close by, they'd have our grandkids. They've been here that long.
AN Oh yeah.
DW And they got to see multiple generations.
AN It's a good school; this particular area was a good area. It was a little above average on the pay scale; the people that lived here. And therefore it makes a nicer area.
EN It was also … I think Jarrettsville Elementary School and North Harford probably, but Jarrettsville Elementary School had one of the best PTA volunteerism in those
days. Parents really, really participated and were interested in their children's education.
AN Didn't they win an award of being a Blue Ribbon School?
EN Well, they were a Blue Ribbon School.
AN Yeah, in the United States.
EN Aside from that, I just mean for parental help and PTA. They went out of their way to help the teachers and to help their children and participate. It was so easy in those days to get people to do something. I mean I don't know what the situation is today.
AN Who was the principal after Fred Baker, Jerry?
EN I guess Jerry Mack.
AN Jerry Mack, yeah. You ask him if he needs any help and he says no my goodness. I have more help from parents around here than I can use.
EN That's another change; we had one elementary school, now we have two.
DW Oh, North Bend, right.
AN And they have the same thing up there. Parents are coming out of the woodwork; they don't need anything. The parents are right there.
EN So we're lucky. I think we live in a wonderful community and I'm glad I'm part of it. I really am.
DW Good. Well, it certainly has been a lot of people moved in but I guess in the sixties there wasn't a lot of migration here. That really didn't happen until closer to the seventies.
AN Yeah, and then some; probably later than that.
DW Well, we probably … moving the drugstore from the corner up to where it is still today was probably correlated to the …
EN Yeah, the need for a bigger place.
AN I built that store and opened it up; people were amazed they would find that kind of a store in the country.
EN We were pictured in a national pharmacy magazine for our décor inside of the pharmacy for a country store.
DW Now do they still have the fountain and the bar stools and everything?
EN Oh yeah.
DW O.k. That's got to be one of the few left in the …
EN It's the only one.
AN In this state, I think that's the only one.
EN I'm not sure the state, but I know in this county. I think they may be somebody in Westminster that still has one or something, but we're the only one around here. To me it's part of the charm of the store. They still have the coffee club in the morning, except now he sits on the other side of the counter. [Laughter] And he has to pay.
AN I have to pay; how do you like that?
EN And he has to pay, but they still flip and they still …
DW Oh jeeze, do you ever lose two days in a row?
AN Oh yeah.
DW [Laughter]
EN I told them that the other day when I was in. I told you guys that Arnold can't lose anymore; I can't afford you all.
AN You know who loses the most?
EN Is the Pharmacist.
AN It's the Pharmacist.
DW Oh yeah?
AN Well, he's there everyday.
DW Yeah, so?
AN [That's why he loses most]
EN He used to lose more …
AN They also figured out who pays Donny Wiley keeps a computerized thing of every …
EN A spreadsheet!
AN He writes down every day who lost and how many coffees they bought. And he had a spreadsheet on that so at the end of the year he knows how many cups of coffee each person bought.
EN It's become a real science.
AN And if you add that up, the amount of times, if you add that up; you never bought any more coffee for anybody but if you would have just paid for your own everyday over the course of the three hundred days you might have come to the coffee club.
EN And it's the fun of the thing.
DW That's a good statistic.
AN Do you remember Kenneth Merryman? Merrymans lived down Route 165. Anyway, he was a farmer and he retired, but he's come to the coffee club every morning. If he was out working in the garden and it sort of slipped his mind, Ruby opened the window and said Kenny; it's time to go to the drugstore. It's time to go to the coffee club.
EN Well Doctor White said that one time, we talked about that, and he said the coffee club was one of the best things that happened because it gave some of these older men a purpose every morning.
AN A place to go.
EN Because you had to get up and go to the drugstore because [you] were expected to be there.
DW Right.
EN And if you weren't there a while, people were worried about you. So it gave them a purpose to get up and get out of the house for a short time and it was good. It was good for morale, you know. And that's the other thing about community here. When Arnold was sick; he had a bad back for what several weeks? Almost of month, I think, and you were flat on your back and I was in the store running the store and I came home and our grass was mowed, the garden was tilled and weeded. Because the coffee club used to come around during the day and they would all take turns and pitch in and take care of our place. Where can you find that any place else?
AN And beside the fact, if you have any problems or things you don't understand, you come to the coffee club and they'll straighten you right out.
DW [Laughs]
AN There isn't a subject they don't know all about.
EN Somebody doesn't know all about; some more than others. [Laughter] So these are the kind of things that really make you feel so good about where you live and what you're part of.
DW You mentioned a lot of names I recognize. I know one that you didn't recognize is Bill, oh jeeze, Bill and Marge?
EN Markley?
DW Markley.
EN Oh, he comes to coffee club now.
DW I know. After I quit working for you, then I came back and I worked for Bill Markley at the gas station that's where the Quick Stop is now. That corner went from the general store to a real gas station.
EN Oh, right.
AN That wasn't Bill Markley.
DW Well, St. Clair's owned it, but Bill Markley managed it.
EN He did? Now see I don't remember that at all.
DW Mm hmm. Bill Markley and Buzzy Smith.
EN I don't remember that.
DW You ask Bill.
AN I'll check that out tomorrow at coffee club.
DW You check that out because I think after that than he taught automotive ...
EN He was teaching in Baltimore County schools, but I didn't know he was there between. I had no idea.
DW Yes, St. Clair … [three people talking at once]
AN Yes, he worked for St. Clair's. Well, that's family owned.
EN No, it's not really. Marge Markley is not a St. Clair; she was an Edwards.
AN Yeah, but isn't Shorty's wife an Edwards?
EN Yeah, but; oh that's right.
AN Shorty St. Clair.
EN But he was a mechanic more than anything. Buzzy Smith was a mechanic, wasn't he?
DW Well, so was Bill.
EN Well Buzzy Smith's father, Cliff Smith, used to farm behind us on Schuster Road and that's how I got my first tractor ride. He would stop at the back of our property and say, come on and get in here if you want to take your first ride. So I had my first tractor ride from Cliff Smith as a city girl.
AN He got run over by that tractor.
DW Yeah.
EN Yeah, that was very sad; he was a wonderful man; I loved him.
DW He lived up around Black Horse, right?
EN Yeah, on Troyer Road.
AN His family is still there.
EN Well the Roses, Nancy and David Rose now live in that house.
AN In those days you go door to door and you could tell everybody lived there; their family, their grandfathers, their uncles and cousins.
EN And that was one of the first things Arnold told me when I came into this community. Do not talk about anybody! [Laughter] Because they're all related. And do you know to this day I'm still finding that out? I'm still finding that out.
AN There's only five families.
EN There's a cousin, oh yeah they're cousins of mine. So that's not a …
AN The second thing I told her was if you come to the store don't say, my God, what smells? Because that was Mr. Calary who just came from the barn to get his coffee. [Laughter] They all come right from the barn to the drugstore to pick up their stuff.
EN And they do; they smell like manure. It was on their shoes and everything.
AN We got used to that smell.
EN Uh huh. Now it's kind of a nice smell in the spring.
AN Yeah, it smells good in the spring.
DW I can remember washing the floors with that smell. [Laughter]
EN I should have known that, right. But that's true; that's two of the things he told me when I moved here. And I could have heard me saying both. What is that smell?
AN Do you remember the smell that came from Hobelman's chicken farm in the spring when they cleaned those things out?
DW Oh yeah.
AN Right down Schuster Road, boy; you couldn't open your windows.
EN You couldn't sit outside in the evening in the summer sometimes. There's nobody original left on that road, nobody.
DW Cogswells, probably.
EN Oh well, Browns.
DW And Browns …
EN And O'Donnell and Browns; that's it.
DW They were after you somewhat, I think.
EN No Brown and O'Donnell I think were before us. Well I know Brown was because when we first put our swimming pool in on Schuster Road, that's how we got our water. We ran hoses across Mullin's, O'Donnell's, to Browns because they have a spring, and they had so much water that they said to us, don't buy water, we'll run water for you. And that's what we did.
AN They have pumps in their basement, and if they didn't pump that water out on time, that house would float away.
EN They have a spring right under their house.
AN They're sitting on a spring.
DW Oh yeah? [Laughs]
EN We actually did that; we ran hoses.
AN Today you wouldn't be allowed to build on that house.
EN I know.
AN So they drilled test wells and found out you can't do that. I imagine that; that was part of Hobelman's farm, I guess when it first happened … a tenant house, I guess they do those things.
DW I think Doctor Charles died.
EN Oh yeah, he did.
DW A while back. His son, Charles, who went by Coke.
EN He's a big doctor.
DW Yeah.
AN I think they still own that eighteen acres.
EN They do?
AN Between where the woods is on Schuster Road. I don't remember it being sold.
EN Isn't that where that house is that's been for sale forever now? I think that's been sold; I don't know. But he's a big doctor and I hear his name sometimes.
DW He was one of the … he's the team's physician for Calvert Hall or one of the big time schools in town.
EN Oh really?
AN It's a big sports medicine at Union Memorial, and that's where they're at. Cokie Hobelman is at Union Memorial also.
DW O.k. While I was changing tapes here, we were having a discussion about church for you and I guess I'm interested to know if there was any reaction from the community when you moved here; being from the Jewish faith?
EN The reaction was a little surprise of how we lived and the first day … I'll tell you a story. The first day we moved here and we keep kosher, which we separate our dishes, milk and meat, and the first day, Dixie Grimmel … I was there all by myself. Arnold was working; my mother had our children in town, and Dixie Grimmel showed up with a lovely spaghetti dinner that I could not accept.
AN Because that's what they do in the country, in the old days.
EN And I didn't know what to do and I didn't know whether to take … So I explained very nicely right off the bat explained to her why I couldn't accept it. And I think from that time on that they realized that we were very upfront with our religions. And I think people respect you more when you respect your own religion. So as far as I know what they ever said behind our back, I have no idea. But as far as I know, we've never had a problem. I have been asked to speak at many of the churches, a lot of the churches when we first came up here. And I've done mock Sedars at Passover time, which also co-insides with Easter. I've done that several times at several different churches. Our children never had a problem in school; only one teacher who wanted to penalize Marcia because she missed an assignment or something. But when he found out he was not supposed to do that, he didn't. But they … we've never as far as I'm aware ever had a problem.
AN There were people that I knew that didn't deal with me because I was Jewish, but it was insignificant, and it wasn't any problem for me. I didn't care.
EN And we go to Synagogue in Pikesville and we go every Saturday and now since we're retired we take classes a couple times a week. So our car kind of goes up and down the road very easily several times a week.
DW [Laughs]
EN So we have that community there which everybody has with their church and then we have our community here. Like I said as far as I know, we've never had a problem.
AN But I always accepted the Christmas cookies at the drugstore.
EN Oh, didn't we though?
AN Yep.
EN My kids used to … Barbara played on the tennis team at North Harford and, of course, for Jewish holidays they did not go to school those days, which is acceptable. It is an acceptable excuse. Barbara played mixed doubles, and Reid Tittle who lived in Forest Hill was her tennis partner. And they were trying to get … She had to be home by sundown for the holiday so mixed doubles used to play last, but the coach would let them move up and play their match first, and then she had to leave. If she missed a point on a set point, he would turn around and say to her, Barbara the sun is setting in the west; you better make this last point. He used to tease her about that. Or you're not going to get home in time. As far as our children know, they've never had a problem.
AN You should come and see our kitchen because we have two sets of everything. It's all separate; the milk and the meat. People are … I don't know what's so amazing about that.
EN Well it is.
AN People are stunned about that, you know. You have to stop and think what fork your taking if you're going to eat this and what spoon you're going to take if you're going to eat that or the dish or the pot or pan. But you get used to that.
EN It took you a while.
AN It took me a while.
DW [Laughs] But its o.k. to take the cookies, huh?
EN Yeah. We don't bring home; we always leave them in the drugstore.
AN Oh yeah, we never turn down cookies. They still bring them to me.
EN In the drugstore.
DW Now we were also talking about people that lived along Schuster Road there. You were saying that your daughter thought that if you weren't Jewish, than you must be Catholic.
AN Most everybody was Catholic.
DW And I never thought about that, but …
EN Well, O'Donnell's, Brown's, Hobelman's … [Cochrans, Mullins]
AN They all had to come to our house; the bus only stopped once. It stopped in front of our house. So they came from your direction and came from Hobelman's direction.
EN Well, they all went to private school, though. Hobelman's and Browns I think always went …
AN St. Johns.
EN Yeah, but then in high school, they all went to Calvert Hall. But the kids all knew that everybody around there was Catholic.
AN They were little then.
EN Yeah, they were small. It was very funny, very funny.
DW [Laughs] Well, that's great. Well, let me see. Are there any other topics that you'd like to cover?
EN No.
DW Is there anything else?
AN On the downside now.
DW On the downside now.
AN I came here when I was twenty-seven years old in March and if the good Lord's willing, I'll be seventy-seven.
DW It will be coming up on fifty years.
EN Well, 2010 will be fifty years; the drugstore will be fifty years old. We'll have to see that Mark has a party for fifty years.
AN It went by in a hurry, too.
DW Yep, that's true, that's true. Now how did he find you when you were ready to sell?
AN Mark worked for me.
DW Oh, o.k.
AN For fourteen years.
DW O.k. Now see that I didn't know. It was a little after I left there.
AN And, of course,... yesterday with the interim through the years, I also had the Whiteford Pharmacy and Darlington Pharmacy also.
DW Right. How did you and Doctor Tom get hooked up?
AN Tom was my salesman.
DW Tom was a salesman.
AN He worked for Henry B. Gilpin Company, and he was my salesman. I called him and he sold me the stuff I carried in the drugstore. So he came in one day, and there was a little pharmacy up in Delta; a little drugstore there and his prices were too high, but I won't say any more about that, but I said who is running the drugstore up there? Would you give up that job. He said yeah, I'll do that. So one thing led to another and we rented a piece of property and put a pharmacy up there and … The fellow I went to school, Jim Foley, who owned the pharmacy in Darlington. He called one day and said he would like to sell it, are you interested? So I was interested and we bought that too, so we had three. Actually we had one in Finksburg too over on Route 140.
EN Uh huh, it burned down.
AN It burned down, yeah. And the over the years, I dropped back and we sold the Darlington store to Tom's son, Robert. Tom and I separated and took each store on our own. Jarrettsville was mine and Whiteford was his. Of course, now he's retired and I'm retired.
EN That's one thing we've been lucky with too. All of our help was a long-time help.
AN Yep.
EN Well, Doctor …
AN Doctor Dave, he worked for [us for] thirty-five years.
EN Thirty-five years.
DW Oh yeah? Now Dave started when I worked for you. I can …
EN Thirty-five years.
AN And he's still working in the drugstore one day a week.
EN And look at Jean Morrison.
AN Look at Jean Morrison; she's still there.
EN She's been there since we opened in this new store. So we were very lucky with our help. I guess that works both ways. They were happy with us and we were happy with them, but we've been very lucky that way. Mark was there, was it thirteen years?
AN Fourteen years.
EN Fourteen years that he worked. And he was sort of anxious to own his own. And Brett's been there a long time. And they went to school together; there were in the same pharmacy school and the same class. Yep.
DW I still see Tom every once in a while. I always kid him about being in the back office counting money. [Laughter]
EN Not anymore; he's fully retired now.
AN Yeah, that's where he liked it.
DW Yeah.
EN He's fully retired now and he golf's and plays cards and relaxes.
AN That's it.
DW Well, I think we've covered a fair amount of territory.
AN That's a lot of years you covered.
DW A lot of years and I'll end the conversation by saying "thank you" and to reiterate that I very much enjoyed working for you forty-five years ago.
AN I enjoyed knowing you, too, and your family.
DW O.k., I'm going to say farewell and thanks a lot.
AN You're welcome.

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Transcript

Harford Living Treasures Arnold & Elke Neuburger
Interviewer: Doug Washburn = DW
Interviewee: Arnold Neuberger = AN
Female voice: Elke Neuberger (wife) = EN
Hello, this is Doug Washburn for the Harford County Public Library. Today is 7, January, 2009 and I'm with Harford Living Treasures, Arnold and Elke Neuburger of Jarrettsville. And for the record let me say that this is a real treat for me since some forty-five years ago, I went to work for Doc Arnold at the Jarrettsville Pharmacy. Our families were in the same neighborhood on Schuster Road for several years. So, welcome and thanks for taking time with me today.
AN It's nice to be here.
DW So, how did you wind up in Jarrettsville?
AN Well, I graduated from pharmacy school in 1959. I got a job; had a small baby and wonderful wife and I went to work in a pharmacy in Linthicum. From there I went to work at Doctor Levin's first on Liberty Road. Well, that didn't last too long and moved to another store in Linthicum down near the airport. I decided early on that, you know, I worked very hard so I may as well work very hard for myself than work for somebody else that hard. So for one reason or another, I was able to acquire Jarrettsville Pharmacy. I purchased it in August of 1960. I commuted for fourteen months; drove back and forth every day at 10:00 at night and came back the next morning at 9:00 to open the store, six days a week and of course on Sunday I worked until 5:00, half a day. That became quite a chore, and I decided I would be better off if I lived here. I thought I would come here for a short time because I didn't know my wife or how I would adapt to country living at a slower pace. I was still a city boy. Believe me this was slow pace in 1960.
DW [Laughs]
AN We decided to build a house which we did on Schuster Road. And in a short time, when the house was done, it was near January 1962; we quickly adapted. And in six months I decided I was never leaving here. This was just a wonderful place. So that's the beginning of whatever else you're going to ask.
DW O.k.
EN Can I add something?
DW Sure.
EN The first time we came here to look at the store was in June or July of '59. And we got in the car and we had no idea where Jarrettsville was. They gave us directions and we came from the Liberty Road Randallstown area. We drove and we drove; I thought Jarrettsville Pike was endless. They sent us through Sweet Air Road and then up Baldwin Mill. I thought we would never get here. I figured I was going to another state. It was hysterical. We got here on a Saturday afternoon; there was one Pharmacist and one clerk in the store.
AN Dorothy Johnson, wasn't it?
DW I don't know.
EN Anyway, we were …
AN At the time he worked for Bunk Grimmel. [All talking at the same time]
DW Is that the Johnson that was up on the cat tail in Madonna?
EN Yes.
DW O.k.
EN Anyhow, we drove and we drove and we got here finally and we looked around and we decided that the price was right. The store was for us. But it was hysterical because, you know; I was born and raised in the city. What did I know about country life? When he came home and said would you move, I said well I'll move maybe for five years because Arnold worked seven days a week then. We had no help. Maybe by the time you get relief Pharmacists and the children are ready to go to school, I'll move back. Well, you are right. We moved here in January and six months, by the end of that summer, I knew this was it for me.
DW Did a realtor help you find the business?
EN No, I got it through the drug wholesaler. My friend who was a sales manager there, Allen Settler; I called him and I said Allen I'm tired of working for somebody else, find me a drugstore for myself. Of course, I never thought it would be up here. It was [not] very long after that he called me and he said well this is a little far away for you, but come and take a look at it and see what you think. Of course we did and that's what happened.
DW And was the drugstore …. well of course the drug store when I worked for you was right next to Harford Gas.
AN Yes.
DW Or Southern States. Was that where the store was when you bought it?
AN Yes. The store was … I had opened the store originally. The store was a year and a half old. The store originally opened in December of 1958. John Padusis was the Pharmacist and his sister was his partner.
EN Agnes Zymades is her name.
AN Agnes Zymdes. In fact, her son was a dentist down here in Fallston in the later years. And they had the store. Well, John didn't like the long rides, and he came to work when he felt like it, and he left when it wasn't busy at night, and things like that. Well, you can't really run a business that way. And she wasn't a Pharmacist, so she had to have him, a Registered Pharmacist. So they just decided to sell it. So I ended up buying it. So I was here about a year and a half, the store.
DW O.k. I didn't remember.
AN Dick Henderson was very instrumental in getting a pharmacy here.
EN And I think the Jarrettsville Lions Club was somewhat involved in getting a pharmacy, through Dick, to get a pharmacy here because people had to travel.
AN You had to go all the way to Bel Air.
EN Bel Air in those days was the closest one. Everybody was very happy when we were here. We had regular hours, and we opened on time and we closed on time. In bad weather, Elizabeth Henderson would call up and say to Arnold, "You are not driving to Baltimore in this weather." You are staying here". So she put him up. She fed him breakfast. Good breakfast; better breakfast than he ever got from me every morning. [Laughter] And he used to stay there.
AN I used to drive that road; I drove that road in a 1950 Chevrolet Coupe. Ed Calary would come up about six or seven o'clock in the evening in bad weather, and he'd put the chains on. And that was fine going home with those chains down Jarrettsville Pike because nothing had been done to that either. But boy you hit that beltway … BANG. The chains broke and they banged that car the rest of the way home. [Laughter]
EN It was terrible.
AN That was a sign that we had to move.
DW When you say "Dick", you mean Dick Henderson?
EN Yes.
AN Yes.
DW Of course he would have been Harford Gas.
AN Right, Harford Gas.
EN He was our first landlord.
DW First landlord, o.k.
AN I was down there seven years before we built around the corner.
DW Yes, o.k. And it was him and his brother.
AN A. B. Henderson.
DW O.k. A.B. lived in the house where the florist …
EN No, right next door to Harford Gas; the big farm house was there.
AN The florist was on the other side. That was …
EN I don't know whose house that was.
AN That was Egelston's.
DW Oh, o.k.
EN I think your right.
DW I remembered that wrong, then. [Laughs]
AN I think it was Egelston's.
EN Well when we moved around the corner we bought … Bob Still owned that house.
AN The state police trooper.
EN It was a house and we burnt the house down and built the store.
DW Now I remember … Was that next to the old Bircham's Store then?
EN Yes.
DW O.k. It wasn't … Because somebody the other day was asking me about a house that used to be in there and I couldn't remember anything.
AN Where the bank is now, was Margaret Daughton's house.
DW Right.
AN And between Margaret Daughton's house and where the drugstore is now, like in that little dip where the drugstore sign is, that's where the old Burcham's Store was.
DW O.k. Then there was a house …
AN Pavey's was on the other side after that.
DW I did not remember the other house except for … the lady that worked for Bircham for so many years.
EN Oh, Pavey's.
DW The called her …
EN Oh, Louise Putnam.
DW Putnam. I remember the grey …
EN That was two doors up from Bircham's.
DW O.k. I just don't remember the house in the middle there.
EN Yes.
DW Well, what other kinds of businesses were in the neighborhood when you came?
AN Well, Water's Brothers Hardware Store and, of course, Southern States. The general store on the corner; that's where you got your hair cut and the post office was in there. Plus you got your groceries and things like that you know.
DW Yes.
AN St. Clair's.
DW Yes, St. Clair's where Keene is today.
AN And old Mr. St. Clair, Albert's father, where the drug store was, he had a black smith shop years ago. His father was a black smith.
DW Oh, I didn't know that.
AN And then he opened up an automobile place there in the beginning, and when things got better, they built across the street and around the corner.
DW You already mentioned Calary's down the road.
EN That was after; they weren't a lot of services around here. I mean I thought I lived in the middle of nowhere so originally I used to go back every week; every time I needed to go to the beauty shop, I went to town. We did grocery shopping; I went to Towson to do grocery shopping. There was a food fair where Towson Town Plaza is now.
AN Across the street from the Towson Towne Plaza.
EN It wasn't a food fair; that's a Super Fresh, which is A&P.
AN Oh, it was the A&P store.
EN We had to leave town really to do everything. It was the boonies for us. [Laughs]
AN Wasn't there a beauty shop here?
EN Didn't know. I was what, twenty-four years old when we came here? What did I know? [Laughter] I was raised in a row house in the city.
DW Right.
EN But it was not easy; it was not hard to become comfortable and find out that this was a good way to live.
AN Well, the people made you feel comfortable.
EN Yes.
AN The farming community and the farmers all worked together in the respect of helping each other out and things like that. And they really wanted a pharmacy. They needed it and it saved them from driving a twelve mile round trip to get a prescription filled or whatever they needed in the way of a pharmacy item. So keeping us here was wonderful for them. And then the drugstore became like a hang-out; like a general store. [Laughter]
DW Which I guess led to the coffee club eventually.
EN Yes.
AN Eventually, yes. That all happened in the new store, but we had old Mr. Calary, Harry Calary. He did all his chores and milked and all that stuff in the morning. By ten o'clock he was ready to come up and have … Of course to him it was lunch, because he had been up since three o'clock in the morning. [Laughs] And sure enough ten o'clock in the morning there was Mr. Calary. He got his lunch, whatever he got and so on and so forth like that. We got all the old stories from him.
EN Didn't he also, after his wife passed away, used to come up for dinner and sit at the fountain?
AN Oh yeah.
EN That's when he used to tell you all about Jarrettsville and what was going on.
AN One time he talked about getting up in the morning and he teased me you know. I said are you kidding? My feet are on the floor seven o'clock in the morning. And he proceeded to tell me what he had done by seven o'clock in the morning because he got up at three. I never said that to him again. [Laughter]
EN It was fun. I guess Mary White's father, Mr. Blackhall; he kind of started with the coffee club because he used to come in the morning for coffee and then at three o'clock in the afternoon.
AN He'd come back.
EN He would come back and drink what was left over in the pot. And then originally Marvel Wynskowski's father and so it kind of got together and it started in the morning with let's flip whose going to pay for coffee. And that's how it all got started.
AN It didn't start until we got around the corner though.
EN Yes that started in the new store.
AN And the club got big.
DW Yes, yes.
AN Big time.
EN And it still goes on.
DW And a couple of articles in the paper about it every once in a while.
AN Oh yeah.
DW I think some of the other people that I can remember coming into drink coffee when I worked for you was Pete Shelton and Johnny Breidenbaugh.
EN Oh yeah. And you know who else? Roger Sexton used to come in every day at 11:30. He worked at Water's Hardware, and he would come for lunch every day and if he didn't show up at 11:30, it wasn't 11:30.
AN It wasn't 11:31, it was 11:30.
EN The back door would open …
DW [Laughs]
AN He hung his coat on the hook back there.
EN Yes. he hung his coat up on the hinge on the door and went up to the fountain.
AN By the time he got up to the fountain; it was a long walk. They had his place set up for him. His napkin was there and his glass of water because he was a regular.
DW That was great.
EN It was a comfortable place to come. The people were comfortable and obviously we made them comfortable and so it's been a wonderful experience.
DW So your girls; you have daughters, right?
EN Yes, two girls.
DW So they would have gone to the old Jarrettsville Elementary School.
EN Right. Mr. Pyle was a principal. Was it Mr. Pyle? No, he was at North Harford.
DW He was at North Harford, right.
AN Mr. Baker?
EN Fred Baker was there, but before Fred Baker. I can't remember who it was. But yes, they went to school there. And I was active in PTA there and that's how I got involved with … Edna Bergman and I together started the Spring Fling for Jarrettsville Elementary School. I think I named it and we started it. I think they still have a Spring Fling every year. But it was also small and it was community and it was wonderful. From there they went to North Harford. North Harford in those days was Junior/Senior High School.
DW Right.
EN There was no middle school, so they went there.
AN Were they there when Mr. Pyle was principal? Or had he already retired?
EN I think he was there like one year and then Joe Evans came as the principal. I was very active up there too. I was PTA president for several years. Mary White used to get me involved in all these things. In the interim my kids joined 4-H and that's how I got involved in 4-H. Mary White said you will come help me, won't you? And so I did, p.s. forty years later I still work with the 4-H in the county.
AN For the interim Mary White's two boys played football. They started an Endzone Club so one thing leads to another, and she was president of the Endzone Club for five years, and I was president of the Endzone Club for five years.
EN And we didn't have any boys. [Laughs]
AN And I didn't have any children that played sports. Well, Barbara played tennis, but not football.
EN Right. And I used to call football games. I started out as a … I was raised … you have to know football to be in my family. And I was a spotter in the beginning for Greg Wilkinson who used to call the games. And he passed away suddenly. So I just took it over and I called for several years, I guess, before we decided to retire from there. But our children were all out of school and in college already when we stopped doing that, because it was fun.
AN That was a fun job.
EN Yeah. And the Endzone Club was a very close knit group of people. It was a brand new type of booster club that they never had before and it strictly supported the football program. The county couldn't afford to do it in those days. As a matter of fact, we were instrumental in getting the first field lights up there so we could have night games at North Harford.
AN We put the scoreboard up. We built the blockhouse where they took the films from [two people talking at once] They built another stand where they sold drinks and hot dogs and things like that on game night, you know. But that was all hard work but it was enjoyable.
DW Well when did football … When I went to North Harford they didn't play football; it wasn't allowed. So when did …
EN Really?
DW No, and I graduated in '65. So do you remember when football even started up there?
EN No.
AN It must have been right after that because …
EN I'm surprised. It must have been right after that. I think Ronnie Tarbert was one of the people who was instrumental in starting that. I think Hayward Putnam may have been involved in that, was he; in starting the Endzone Club, because we pretty much used to buy helmets and uniforms. It had to be a program maybe that was in other schools because a lot of them had lights, like Bel Air High School, of course, obviously had lights way before us. We were one of the last, but I couldn't tell you that.
DW What kind of changes did you see in the education system as your kids were going through? Any improvements or things you weren't happy with?
EN No, I was very happy. I found that when our kids were there, especially in elementary school, they were the minority in the class that wasn't from a farm family. Most of your children were farmers. By the time they got to high school it was probably the opposite. The farm kids were on the down side of the kids who didn't live on a farm, because a lot of the farms had been sold and developments had started and things like that, so. No, the school system was good; they were good to our children. They put a lot in and they both were very lucky with public school. They went to good colleges and they have good jobs. I was happy with Harford County system.
DW Good. You mentioned the 4-H. Do you know any of the history of how things started off? I know that you're active in Farm Fair, too. So how did 4-H evolve into the Farm Fair?
EN Well, of course, 4-H were individual clubs, and in Jarrettsville we started out when our children were young in one 4-H club and then they moved. Mary White and I had Happy Helpers and then we moved on and as our kids got a little older we started Willing Workers Junior and then when we had seniors, we went to Willing Workers Seniors. We worked…. There was a fair. We had a Harford County 4-H Fair at Rocks 4-H Camp. That was since my children were in 4-H; that went on. And so I guess we were almost twenty years up there when Doctor Cook, Richard Cook, came to me and said would you meet with us, we are looking to start a County Fair again. The old County Fair used to be where Harford Mall is now.
DW The race track.
EN And of course that was the end of that. So I met with them, and they said do you think you could convince 4-H to come in? If not, we can't probably support a County Fair. So I went back and met with some people, and we decided to go with them because to be perfectly honest like I said about the farm kids being on the down side; our fair was on the down side, with the animal end of it. They were less dairy farms, less beef farms around at the time, and so we were on the decline. We decided to do it and that's how it came to be. So I ended up on the Board of the Farm Fair as an initial Board member. I'm only, I think, one of two right now that are still on the Farm Fair board from the original group. Its worked well and it really got exposure for 4-H as well as agriculture in the county. And our 4-H program has grown from it. So, we're doing very well and we enjoy it and we get a lot more exposure there, and it's great. It's a lot of work. It's become a year- round job, but it's good.
DW Earlier too, you had mentioned the Lions Club. What's a little history of what the Lions Club is all about?
AN Well it goes back to Dick Henderson again. Lions Club was a service organization back. In fact, it's one of the largest service organizations in the world today. Dick Henderson was instrumental in getting that started, too. In fact he might have been the first…. He brought me into it. I came here in 1960, and he convinced me to join the Lions Club in 1963. I've been in the Lions Club, I guess, about forty-five years. It's a group again; it's all about community. They serve the community and raise a lot of money. We have a big carnival and raise a lot of money, and all that money gets distributed to the needy people or needy programs in the community. And again, in the beginning you met the same farmers that I met at the drugstore. They were all in the Lions Club, too. Of course, now that's spread out too. In the beginning when I first got in the Lions Club we had eighty some members and that started a real decline. It dropped way back to maybe thirty or thirty-five. Now we're back to sixty some members. So it's starting to grow a little bit. It's very difficult for service organizations today because people don't have time for that. They are busy, they work, and the wife works. When they go home and they have to take the children to dance lessons, piano lessons, baseball practice and all those things. People don't have time for service organizations any more, which is very important. It's a shame.
EN Volunteerism all over is falling off.
AN Everything is hurting, yeah.
EN And I understand it's not only that; we have problems in 4-H getting new volunteers to help. I think rec programs cut into a lot of that, which are wonderful, but they've cut into a lot of the things. Because it's easier to go play ball than it is to do volunteer work. But Lions Club also supports the eye.
AN Well that was originally an eye bank. Sight still is our big program; it's supported world-wide. We've gotten into hearing aids and things like that. You know you can come to the Lions Club and ask for anything if you are having some problems paying your heat bill. We have a lot of people in the community that lose their jobs or get a sickness and they come up against it and they'll come to the Lions Club and ask. There are no questions asked; they check it out and they're right there with help. We don't do it all but we're there with help.
DW Great. I guess I was not aware of all that, the history of the Lions. Well let me see, what else do we have here? How about the town square before the traffic light? The roads were paved before you came, right?
AN Oh yeah.
EN Except for Old Federal Hill, no, [North] Furnace Road.
AN [North] Furnace Road.
EN [North] Furnace Road wasn't paved when you lived here.
DW I know.
AN I remember a warm July afternoon; I could go out and lay in the middle of that road. Nobody would bother me. [Laughter] Now you can't. You go out of the drugstore and try to get out of that road … like on Friday, it's very difficult.
DW Now the hotel, the old store …
AN That was before I came here.
DW The hotel was.
AN The old firehouse was where the hotel was.
DW Keene uses the garage now, but that was gone out of the town.
EN We're not that old! [Laughs]
DW Well, I can remember being in the general store; I worked in the general store before I came to work for you. And I can remember before there was a traffic light there.
AN Oh yeah.
EN Mr. Clarence Burton; you worked for him?
DW No, he was the Post Master.
EN Oh right, right.
DW It was Burgess.
EN Oh right, Burgess. Then they moved to Florida, didn't they?
DW Yes, they lived up next to Wilbur Waters on Schuster Road.
EN And the barber was Adrian Yell.
DW Yep.
EN And when the fire siren would go off …
AN He dropped cutting your hair and ran out in the middle of the road because he directed traffic.
EN He was the traffic director for the fire department.
DW [Laughs]
AN So you had to wait until he came back to get your hair finished.
DW That was a shame when they tore that store down.
EN And there was no bank in Jarrettsville. Arnold used to drive to Forest Hill to go to the bank. That was the closest.
AN And where the shopping center is, the strip of stores; that was the old Jarrett place, originally.
EN Well originally it was the Jarrett place, yes.
AN That house was built in 1842.
EN Do you remember that big house?
DW Oh sure. Keyes lived there.
EN Keyes lived there, right.
DW Yes, that was still there when I worked at the general store.
EN It was a beautiful home. They tried … A. B. Henderson tried to be instrumental. He got a group together. I went to a meeting or two, but it didn't work in trying to preserve that house. But by the time they got there, the inside of the house had been so vandalized that … the staircase had been taken out.
AN The Historical Society wanted to keep that.
EN Yeah, it just wasn't feasible to do it because the interior was so depleted.
AN The bricks for that house were brought from England in 1842 to build that house.
DW [Hang on a second; let me flip the tape here.] It was quite common in the old days where the bricks were actually used as ballast in the ships coming over. They would come over for the raw materials to take them back to England and they would use bricks as ballast to come over here.
AN That was what I was told; that the bricks came from England.
EN Weren't the people that lived there originally Brown? Why does that name ring a bell?
AN Somebody committed suicide in there; hung themselves.
DW Now that's a story I have not heard.
EN Me neither.
AN Yeah.
EN But I think the name was Brown. But they were part of the Jarrett family. I think so; I'll have to look that up.
DW No, I don't remember that. How about when the new Post Office was built? Was that at the same as the general store being torn down? Is that what prompted that?
AN Yeah, probably.
EN Because there was no place else.
AN Grimmel's had that piece of property, and they built the Post Office.
EN Which we've kind of outgrown. But it's like …
AN We've got the nice … Grimmel's, their store.
EN Oh yea, Grimmel's Hardware store.
DW Oh yeah. That would have been there.
AN They sold coal and all that kind of stuff.
DW Oh yes.
EN They had a big business there. And of course Kefauver; well that's Forest Hill, but Kefauver Lumber; that's who built all our houses and our schools.
DW Being in the pharmacy business, obviously you would have had a lot of exposure to the prescriptions written by the local doctors.
AN Yes.
DW And I know you are good friends with Jim White. Was there anybody else that was even in the area?
AN Yes, right across where the doctors are now. There are three doctors there next to the Waters'. There was a house there, Doctor Mosely, T. Mosely. He had an office there. He and Jim White were the only two physicians here in those days. It was right next to Waters'. Mr. [Dr.] White was up there on Houcks Mill Road.
EN He was just here a short time when we were here. I don't know how … he didn't stay very long.
AN Who, Mosely?
EN Yes. I remember it was a little white building that he was in. I don't know, because we always went to Jim White and he was all the way up on Houcks Mill Road. And you just walked in you didn't need an appointment like you do in doctors' offices now. You went in and you sat and waited your turn, twice a day; morning and then late in the evening.
DW And, of course, Jim made house calls.
EN Oh yes. And that's how we became friendly and our children became very friendly, and of course they're still very friendly. Our families are pretty close.
AN There was a dentist, wasn't there?
EN A dentist started in the building, Ivan Gardner …
AN Where this office building is.
EN Next to the cemetery? That big brick office building?
AN That was a great big green cottage, three story old farm house, green cottage. And they built that building around it. You couldn't get permits to build a new building or anything like that. You could do what you wanted when you were repairing the older building, the original building. So he built a new building around that and then they went inside and tore the old part out or rearranged it. [Laughter] And that's how that building came about.
EN But he started out there as a dentist; he was the first dentist in town, Ivan Gardner that I remember when we were here.
AN Yeah.
EN And then he left and Ron Reichert came. Was there somebody between them? Ron Reichert started in his home.
AN Dr. May.
EN That was after Ron Reichert, no May was in between.
AN Reichert bought it from Doctor May.
EN But he was on Dulaney Drive and Jarrettsville Road in the basement of the house. They owned the house and then Doctor May was down there and then sold to Ron Reichert. And they moved in there and did that. That was the dentist.
AN And Manny Sklar.
EN Was the eye doctor.
AN Yes, but did he go in where Gardner, where the dentist was?
EN Might have; I don't remember.
AN Jarrettsville was growing and we were, you know, after a while in later years you really could stay in the community. You didn't have to leave outside of a place to buy clothes.
EN Yeah. It was nice to have more services that you didn't have to leave the community.
AN Everything was right here.
EN And it was kind of nice for us. It was interesting because you knew everybody in those days. Not only did you know; you knew them, you knew their mothers, you knew their grandparents and when somebody came in, you could ask how everybody was.
AN That's how I could hire Doug Washburn, because I knew his father, Glen.
DW [Laughs]
EN Right.
AN And they both came from good families, so it was o.k. to hire him.
EN And also as the children grew up and had children; that's how Arnold used to get a hold of the little babies and he was always the first one to give them their first lollipop and drive the mothers crazy because they would drool all that sticky down on them. And he loved it! He loved watching them do that! [Laughter] Many a kid around here has had lollipops drooled down their snow suits from him.
AN [both talking at same time] everybody; it was just nice.
DW That certainly must have been a change from; that must have been the single biggest change from city life.
EN Oh yeah.
AN Never heard of such a thing.
EN Both of our families, our parents thought we moved to Timbuktu.
AN The other end of the world.
EN Well your mother really thought it was the end of the world.
AN The old Loch Raven bridge before the one they have now, you know the other rickety thing. So mother and my father drove up to visit and she said to my father, are you going to drive across that? [Laughter] Do we have to go across that bridge? Yes, we have to go across that bridge if you want to get there; unless you want to swim. She thought my goodness.
DW Were your parents long-time Baltimore area?
EN Oh yeah.
DW I mean your father; that was your roots?
EN Yeah.
AN So now when I drive from here to Towson, it's like from here to the end of the driveway; I don't give it a second thought.
DW [Laughs]
AN They have to come all the way to town to do this or do that; I go, well it's only a half hour, you know. Because most of the people in the city they want a place to go in five minutes. If not, they don't go there.
DW Right.
EN Yeah. It's nice. We used to say we would go to visit our families on the weekends and it was awful nice in the summertime when you hit the county, Baltimore/Harford County line and you knew you were home. And it even smelled different.
AN The air changed.
EN It really did. But watching the developments around here has been a little bit hard because you hated to see the farmers and the farm land go. And they're few and far between now.
DW Yep. All the ones that are left are huge.
EN They have to be.
AN They've got to be.
EN You can't be a small farmer anymore.
DW Well the machinery costs … If you're not farming a couple of thousand acres; you can't afford to buy the machinery.
EN Exactly.
DW You either have to own it or rent it. So what other kind of changes other than the housing developments have you seen?
AN Well the whole turnover of the population, different types of people. Of course the world has changed. We're talking about the good times that we had in the past, but the world isn't like that anymore. The new people that moved in across the road over there, in Secora's house … how long have they been here?
EN A couple of years. I've never even seen them.
AN Nobody's ever seen them; we don't know them.
EN I don't think their neighbors know them.
AN You know when people come here now … everybody leaves a community to work someplace else. They just sleep here. There isn't community like as such like we knew it, like you and I knew it from the old days.
DW Right.
EN But I am happy to see that some younger people now are joining Lions Club.
AN Oh yeah.
EN Which has been wonderful because the older generation can't do the work, the physical work that it entails. I mean, they redo homes for people. You have … Lions Club has built ramps for people that are wheel chair bound that need into their homes. Several have been done for people over the years. The older guys can't do that kind of physical labor anymore, so they do have a lot of new young people coming in and it's kind of nice to see that, that they're taking a part in the community.
AN And you've got these new schools that are very nice North Harford High School was rebuilt for forty-six million dollars for the school, but … Have you been in there?
DW Yes, in a couple of sections. I haven't been through the whole thing.
EN It is magnificent.
AN You've got to take a day off to go through the whole thing, it's so big. It's magnificent, it really is.
EN It's magnificent. We went to the show; the senior class did Les Mis, well the whole did the show. The auditorium is like sitting in a theatre; better than the theatres. It was just fabulous. The staging, the performances; it was one of the best productions I've seen, and we've seen that show professionally several times. And I think North Harford did a magnificent job. You know, the programs have changed at the school; the agricultural programs are much more expanded then when our kids were there.
DW Agriculture?
EN Yes, it's now a magnet agriculture school; it's a magnet program, you know.
AN They bring them in from all the other schools.
EN From all over. And it's expanded to even being involved with animal science or vet science, that type of thing; there's some of that. Community … you can bring your dog in there certain days of the week to be trimmed and groomed and things, so the programs have expanded. They also have a young pre-school program up there several days a week for the seniors that are going into education and to pre-school education. I think Harford County has done a very good job with public schools.
AN People today, they require services. You know years ago, mom didn't work; she stayed home and took care of her children. The mother is working and somebody's got to not only take their children at the early stages but there is so much more to learn today. This is one world and there's so much more to learn therefore they offer so much more. People demand more services.
DW Well…
EN I'm not sure if I can't think of much else.
AN I can't tell you about the future.
DW Can't tell me about the future, huh?
EN You never know what's going to happen tomorrow.
AN It's a nice community to live in. It's very safe and secure here even though we have crime here; it's the same in other places. Of course, not in the magnitude of other places, but you still have to be careful. If I forget to lock the door, I really don't worry about it too much. [Laughs]
DW You don't get back up out of bed if you remember, huh?
EN He did that one time with the old drugstore.
AN Oh yes, a lot of times at ten o'clock at night, I've rushed to get out of there so I closed the door and I'm going. I would come back the next morning and the damn door is unlocked.
DW [Laughs]
AN I said to the Dick Henderson, you know what I did last night? I went home and the darn store was unlocked. So? [Laughter] So was everything there when you got back this morning? I said yeah it was there, but still.
EN Well, when we first moved here they used to tease me because the milkman, if I wasn't going to be home, he didn't understand why … He said to me I know you came from the city because you lock your doors. Because he used to go in everybody's back door and put the milk in the refrigerator. Well, I'd lock the door.
AN She would tell him I'm not going to be here on Thursday, so don't leave any milk. He says, why? She said well I'm not going to be here; you can't leave the milk sit out in the sun; it's July. It's alright, I'll just put it in the refrigerator for you; no problem.
DW [Laughs]
EN And he used to tease me and said I know you came from the city because you're one of the only people around that locks their doors.
DW I'll be darn.
EN And pulls their curtains down at night. That was another thing they used to tease me about. [Laughter]
AN We have a … the back of our house was all glass and my mother-in-law used to come and we didn't have any curtains up. I'm looking at forty-four acres of undeveloped ground back there. She said you don't have any curtain. I said who's going to see? There's nobody back there.
EN I used to say mom I'm ten acres and nobody's going to know and then of course Grimmel's farm is attached to us so it didn't matter. But that's appalling when you come from the city. These are things that you would just do. Really it was hard in the beginning. But our children are so happy they're here. When they have to move on … and the first time Barbara got an apartment when she went to work and she had to pick which unit she wanted. And she picked one with a tree outside. I want to see a tree and grass; I don't want to see the concrete parking lot. And that's why Marcia still lives in Jarrettsville because she likes the country and she likes that feeling.
DW Does she commute to the town for work?
EN Downtown Baltimore every day.
AN Inner Harbor; she works for T. Rowe Price and drives for an hour every day.
DW Wow.
AN But you know, she wouldn't survive living in the city. She wouldn't have anything to do with her bird feeders and her hammock.
EN And her garden!
AN And her garden and her grill. What's she going to do with all those things? You don't do that in the city. [Laughter]
EN Well you don't in a condo where she would probably move.
AN Well, that's where everybody lives, pretty much, yeah.
EN She likes … they like … they love …
AN She thought about doing that.
EN They loved country life.
DW That's a big transition.
EN Well see now actually they don't know any different. Marcia was ten months old when we moved here. So they really don't know any different. They made life-long friends up here, too. You know what else I found out? This is something. I found out when children our kid's age when they graduated high school or if they went away to college and all, they wanted to run out because there was nothing here. You had to go out. There was nothing here to offer young people. Today I know a lot of my children's classmates from high school who have moved back here with children because they found out that this was a good community to raise your children in. To me that's saying something about your community.
AN I read an article not too long ago that said on average everybody drives an hour to work. Today you can't afford to live in the Metropolitan area; it's so expensive.
DW I know that there was a … some of the teachers up at North Harford that had (my wife and I) they had our kids and if our kids were close by, they'd have our grandkids. They've been here that long.
AN Oh yeah.
DW And they got to see multiple generations.
AN It's a good school; this particular area was a good area. It was a little above average on the pay scale; the people that lived here. And therefore it makes a nicer area.
EN It was also … I think Jarrettsville Elementary School and North Harford probably, but Jarrettsville Elementary School had one of the best PTA volunteerism in those
days. Parents really, really participated and were interested in their children's education.
AN Didn't they win an award of being a Blue Ribbon School?
EN Well, they were a Blue Ribbon School.
AN Yeah, in the United States.
EN Aside from that, I just mean for parental help and PTA. They went out of their way to help the teachers and to help their children and participate. It was so easy in those days to get people to do something. I mean I don't know what the situation is today.
AN Who was the principal after Fred Baker, Jerry?
EN I guess Jerry Mack.
AN Jerry Mack, yeah. You ask him if he needs any help and he says no my goodness. I have more help from parents around here than I can use.
EN That's another change; we had one elementary school, now we have two.
DW Oh, North Bend, right.
AN And they have the same thing up there. Parents are coming out of the woodwork; they don't need anything. The parents are right there.
EN So we're lucky. I think we live in a wonderful community and I'm glad I'm part of it. I really am.
DW Good. Well, it certainly has been a lot of people moved in but I guess in the sixties there wasn't a lot of migration here. That really didn't happen until closer to the seventies.
AN Yeah, and then some; probably later than that.
DW Well, we probably … moving the drugstore from the corner up to where it is still today was probably correlated to the …
EN Yeah, the need for a bigger place.
AN I built that store and opened it up; people were amazed they would find that kind of a store in the country.
EN We were pictured in a national pharmacy magazine for our décor inside of the pharmacy for a country store.
DW Now do they still have the fountain and the bar stools and everything?
EN Oh yeah.
DW O.k. That's got to be one of the few left in the …
EN It's the only one.
AN In this state, I think that's the only one.
EN I'm not sure the state, but I know in this county. I think they may be somebody in Westminster that still has one or something, but we're the only one around here. To me it's part of the charm of the store. They still have the coffee club in the morning, except now he sits on the other side of the counter. [Laughter] And he has to pay.
AN I have to pay; how do you like that?
EN And he has to pay, but they still flip and they still …
DW Oh jeeze, do you ever lose two days in a row?
AN Oh yeah.
DW [Laughter]
EN I told them that the other day when I was in. I told you guys that Arnold can't lose anymore; I can't afford you all.
AN You know who loses the most?
EN Is the Pharmacist.
AN It's the Pharmacist.
DW Oh yeah?
AN Well, he's there everyday.
DW Yeah, so?
AN [That's why he loses most]
EN He used to lose more …
AN They also figured out who pays Donny Wiley keeps a computerized thing of every …
EN A spreadsheet!
AN He writes down every day who lost and how many coffees they bought. And he had a spreadsheet on that so at the end of the year he knows how many cups of coffee each person bought.
EN It's become a real science.
AN And if you add that up, the amount of times, if you add that up; you never bought any more coffee for anybody but if you would have just paid for your own everyday over the course of the three hundred days you might have come to the coffee club.
EN And it's the fun of the thing.
DW That's a good statistic.
AN Do you remember Kenneth Merryman? Merrymans lived down Route 165. Anyway, he was a farmer and he retired, but he's come to the coffee club every morning. If he was out working in the garden and it sort of slipped his mind, Ruby opened the window and said Kenny; it's time to go to the drugstore. It's time to go to the coffee club.
EN Well Doctor White said that one time, we talked about that, and he said the coffee club was one of the best things that happened because it gave some of these older men a purpose every morning.
AN A place to go.
EN Because you had to get up and go to the drugstore because [you] were expected to be there.
DW Right.
EN And if you weren't there a while, people were worried about you. So it gave them a purpose to get up and get out of the house for a short time and it was good. It was good for morale, you know. And that's the other thing about community here. When Arnold was sick; he had a bad back for what several weeks? Almost of month, I think, and you were flat on your back and I was in the store running the store and I came home and our grass was mowed, the garden was tilled and weeded. Because the coffee club used to come around during the day and they would all take turns and pitch in and take care of our place. Where can you find that any place else?
AN And beside the fact, if you have any problems or things you don't understand, you come to the coffee club and they'll straighten you right out.
DW [Laughs]
AN There isn't a subject they don't know all about.
EN Somebody doesn't know all about; some more than others. [Laughter] So these are the kind of things that really make you feel so good about where you live and what you're part of.
DW You mentioned a lot of names I recognize. I know one that you didn't recognize is Bill, oh jeeze, Bill and Marge?
EN Markley?
DW Markley.
EN Oh, he comes to coffee club now.
DW I know. After I quit working for you, then I came back and I worked for Bill Markley at the gas station that's where the Quick Stop is now. That corner went from the general store to a real gas station.
EN Oh, right.
AN That wasn't Bill Markley.
DW Well, St. Clair's owned it, but Bill Markley managed it.
EN He did? Now see I don't remember that at all.
DW Mm hmm. Bill Markley and Buzzy Smith.
EN I don't remember that.
DW You ask Bill.
AN I'll check that out tomorrow at coffee club.
DW You check that out because I think after that than he taught automotive ...
EN He was teaching in Baltimore County schools, but I didn't know he was there between. I had no idea.
DW Yes, St. Clair … [three people talking at once]
AN Yes, he worked for St. Clair's. Well, that's family owned.
EN No, it's not really. Marge Markley is not a St. Clair; she was an Edwards.
AN Yeah, but isn't Shorty's wife an Edwards?
EN Yeah, but; oh that's right.
AN Shorty St. Clair.
EN But he was a mechanic more than anything. Buzzy Smith was a mechanic, wasn't he?
DW Well, so was Bill.
EN Well Buzzy Smith's father, Cliff Smith, used to farm behind us on Schuster Road and that's how I got my first tractor ride. He would stop at the back of our property and say, come on and get in here if you want to take your first ride. So I had my first tractor ride from Cliff Smith as a city girl.
AN He got run over by that tractor.
DW Yeah.
EN Yeah, that was very sad; he was a wonderful man; I loved him.
DW He lived up around Black Horse, right?
EN Yeah, on Troyer Road.
AN His family is still there.
EN Well the Roses, Nancy and David Rose now live in that house.
AN In those days you go door to door and you could tell everybody lived there; their family, their grandfathers, their uncles and cousins.
EN And that was one of the first things Arnold told me when I came into this community. Do not talk about anybody! [Laughter] Because they're all related. And do you know to this day I'm still finding that out? I'm still finding that out.
AN There's only five families.
EN There's a cousin, oh yeah they're cousins of mine. So that's not a …
AN The second thing I told her was if you come to the store don't say, my God, what smells? Because that was Mr. Calary who just came from the barn to get his coffee. [Laughter] They all come right from the barn to the drugstore to pick up their stuff.
EN And they do; they smell like manure. It was on their shoes and everything.
AN We got used to that smell.
EN Uh huh. Now it's kind of a nice smell in the spring.
AN Yeah, it smells good in the spring.
DW I can remember washing the floors with that smell. [Laughter]
EN I should have known that, right. But that's true; that's two of the things he told me when I moved here. And I could have heard me saying both. What is that smell?
AN Do you remember the smell that came from Hobelman's chicken farm in the spring when they cleaned those things out?
DW Oh yeah.
AN Right down Schuster Road, boy; you couldn't open your windows.
EN You couldn't sit outside in the evening in the summer sometimes. There's nobody original left on that road, nobody.
DW Cogswells, probably.
EN Oh well, Browns.
DW And Browns …
EN And O'Donnell and Browns; that's it.
DW They were after you somewhat, I think.
EN No Brown and O'Donnell I think were before us. Well I know Brown was because when we first put our swimming pool in on Schuster Road, that's how we got our water. We ran hoses across Mullin's, O'Donnell's, to Browns because they have a spring, and they had so much water that they said to us, don't buy water, we'll run water for you. And that's what we did.
AN They have pumps in their basement, and if they didn't pump that water out on time, that house would float away.
EN They have a spring right under their house.
AN They're sitting on a spring.
DW Oh yeah? [Laughs]
EN We actually did that; we ran hoses.
AN Today you wouldn't be allowed to build on that house.
EN I know.
AN So they drilled test wells and found out you can't do that. I imagine that; that was part of Hobelman's farm, I guess when it first happened … a tenant house, I guess they do those things.
DW I think Doctor Charles died.
EN Oh yeah, he did.
DW A while back. His son, Charles, who went by Coke.
EN He's a big doctor.
DW Yeah.
AN I think they still own that eighteen acres.
EN They do?
AN Between where the woods is on Schuster Road. I don't remember it being sold.
EN Isn't that where that house is that's been for sale forever now? I think that's been sold; I don't know. But he's a big doctor and I hear his name sometimes.
DW He was one of the … he's the team's physician for Calvert Hall or one of the big time schools in town.
EN Oh really?
AN It's a big sports medicine at Union Memorial, and that's where they're at. Cokie Hobelman is at Union Memorial also.
DW O.k. While I was changing tapes here, we were having a discussion about church for you and I guess I'm interested to know if there was any reaction from the community when you moved here; being from the Jewish faith?
EN The reaction was a little surprise of how we lived and the first day … I'll tell you a story. The first day we moved here and we keep kosher, which we separate our dishes, milk and meat, and the first day, Dixie Grimmel … I was there all by myself. Arnold was working; my mother had our children in town, and Dixie Grimmel showed up with a lovely spaghetti dinner that I could not accept.
AN Because that's what they do in the country, in the old days.
EN And I didn't know what to do and I didn't know whether to take … So I explained very nicely right off the bat explained to her why I couldn't accept it. And I think from that time on that they realized that we were very upfront with our religions. And I think people respect you more when you respect your own religion. So as far as I know what they ever said behind our back, I have no idea. But as far as I know, we've never had a problem. I have been asked to speak at many of the churches, a lot of the churches when we first came up here. And I've done mock Sedars at Passover time, which also co-insides with Easter. I've done that several times at several different churches. Our children never had a problem in school; only one teacher who wanted to penalize Marcia because she missed an assignment or something. But when he found out he was not supposed to do that, he didn't. But they … we've never as far as I'm aware ever had a problem.
AN There were people that I knew that didn't deal with me because I was Jewish, but it was insignificant, and it wasn't any problem for me. I didn't care.
EN And we go to Synagogue in Pikesville and we go every Saturday and now since we're retired we take classes a couple times a week. So our car kind of goes up and down the road very easily several times a week.
DW [Laughs]
EN So we have that community there which everybody has with their church and then we have our community here. Like I said as far as I know, we've never had a problem.
AN But I always accepted the Christmas cookies at the drugstore.
EN Oh, didn't we though?
AN Yep.
EN My kids used to … Barbara played on the tennis team at North Harford and, of course, for Jewish holidays they did not go to school those days, which is acceptable. It is an acceptable excuse. Barbara played mixed doubles, and Reid Tittle who lived in Forest Hill was her tennis partner. And they were trying to get … She had to be home by sundown for the holiday so mixed doubles used to play last, but the coach would let them move up and play their match first, and then she had to leave. If she missed a point on a set point, he would turn around and say to her, Barbara the sun is setting in the west; you better make this last point. He used to tease her about that. Or you're not going to get home in time. As far as our children know, they've never had a problem.
AN You should come and see our kitchen because we have two sets of everything. It's all separate; the milk and the meat. People are … I don't know what's so amazing about that.
EN Well it is.
AN People are stunned about that, you know. You have to stop and think what fork your taking if you're going to eat this and what spoon you're going to take if you're going to eat that or the dish or the pot or pan. But you get used to that.
EN It took you a while.
AN It took me a while.
DW [Laughs] But its o.k. to take the cookies, huh?
EN Yeah. We don't bring home; we always leave them in the drugstore.
AN Oh yeah, we never turn down cookies. They still bring them to me.
EN In the drugstore.
DW Now we were also talking about people that lived along Schuster Road there. You were saying that your daughter thought that if you weren't Jewish, than you must be Catholic.
AN Most everybody was Catholic.
DW And I never thought about that, but …
EN Well, O'Donnell's, Brown's, Hobelman's … [Cochrans, Mullins]
AN They all had to come to our house; the bus only stopped once. It stopped in front of our house. So they came from your direction and came from Hobelman's direction.
EN Well, they all went to private school, though. Hobelman's and Browns I think always went …
AN St. Johns.
EN Yeah, but then in high school, they all went to Calvert Hall. But the kids all knew that everybody around there was Catholic.
AN They were little then.
EN Yeah, they were small. It was very funny, very funny.
DW [Laughs] Well, that's great. Well, let me see. Are there any other topics that you'd like to cover?
EN No.
DW Is there anything else?
AN On the downside now.
DW On the downside now.
AN I came here when I was twenty-seven years old in March and if the good Lord's willing, I'll be seventy-seven.
DW It will be coming up on fifty years.
EN Well, 2010 will be fifty years; the drugstore will be fifty years old. We'll have to see that Mark has a party for fifty years.
AN It went by in a hurry, too.
DW Yep, that's true, that's true. Now how did he find you when you were ready to sell?
AN Mark worked for me.
DW Oh, o.k.
AN For fourteen years.
DW O.k. Now see that I didn't know. It was a little after I left there.
AN And, of course,... yesterday with the interim through the years, I also had the Whiteford Pharmacy and Darlington Pharmacy also.
DW Right. How did you and Doctor Tom get hooked up?
AN Tom was my salesman.
DW Tom was a salesman.
AN He worked for Henry B. Gilpin Company, and he was my salesman. I called him and he sold me the stuff I carried in the drugstore. So he came in one day, and there was a little pharmacy up in Delta; a little drugstore there and his prices were too high, but I won't say any more about that, but I said who is running the drugstore up there? Would you give up that job. He said yeah, I'll do that. So one thing led to another and we rented a piece of property and put a pharmacy up there and … The fellow I went to school, Jim Foley, who owned the pharmacy in Darlington. He called one day and said he would like to sell it, are you interested? So I was interested and we bought that too, so we had three. Actually we had one in Finksburg too over on Route 140.
EN Uh huh, it burned down.
AN It burned down, yeah. And the over the years, I dropped back and we sold the Darlington store to Tom's son, Robert. Tom and I separated and took each store on our own. Jarrettsville was mine and Whiteford was his. Of course, now he's retired and I'm retired.
EN That's one thing we've been lucky with too. All of our help was a long-time help.
AN Yep.
EN Well, Doctor …
AN Doctor Dave, he worked for [us for] thirty-five years.
EN Thirty-five years.
DW Oh yeah? Now Dave started when I worked for you. I can …
EN Thirty-five years.
AN And he's still working in the drugstore one day a week.
EN And look at Jean Morrison.
AN Look at Jean Morrison; she's still there.
EN She's been there since we opened in this new store. So we were very lucky with our help. I guess that works both ways. They were happy with us and we were happy with them, but we've been very lucky that way. Mark was there, was it thirteen years?
AN Fourteen years.
EN Fourteen years that he worked. And he was sort of anxious to own his own. And Brett's been there a long time. And they went to school together; there were in the same pharmacy school and the same class. Yep.
DW I still see Tom every once in a while. I always kid him about being in the back office counting money. [Laughter]
EN Not anymore; he's fully retired now.
AN Yeah, that's where he liked it.
DW Yeah.
EN He's fully retired now and he golf's and plays cards and relaxes.
AN That's it.
DW Well, I think we've covered a fair amount of territory.
AN That's a lot of years you covered.
DW A lot of years and I'll end the conversation by saying "thank you" and to reiterate that I very much enjoyed working for you forty-five years ago.
AN I enjoyed knowing you, too, and your family.
DW O.k., I'm going to say farewell and thanks a lot.
AN You're welcome.